John Walker's Fourmilab Change Log

Friday, May 30, 2008

Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon Updated

Although it is the sixteenth book in the series, Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon was the first to be posted in Fourmilab's Tom Swift and His Pocket Library collection. Over the years since it was prepared in 2004, I've accumulated a number of mark-ups for typographical errors reported by eagle-eyed readers. All of these corrections, including several for items I spotted while integrating the changes, are included in the updated edition now available from the Pocket Library page. This edition was prepared with the current (version 3.3) release of ETset. The HTML document is XHTML 1.0 Strict with Unicode text entities for dashes, opening and closing quotes, and other special characters.

Posted at
14:53

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

King of the Stump

Click image to enlarge.

As spring passes into summer and interesting sights abound in the
countryside around Lignières, I'll be posting occasional pictures which caught my eye. Pas grand chose, just the odd bright image bobbing on the grey river of text which dominates this chronicle.

These bad actors were spotted in the parc à chèvres of the Métairie du Landeron on Sunday, May 25th, 2008. I usually walk up to there on Sunday afternoons: it's a 5.3 km round trip with a total of about 145 metres of ascent which takes about an hour.

This is the six hundredth posting on Fourmilog.

Posted at
00:35

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Farming with Dynamite

From 1910:

No mule to feed.
No hands to pay.
You're farming now,
the modern way:with dynamite!

Posted at
00:58

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Perl: Finance::YahooQuote Update

If you're using the Perl module Finance::YahooQuote to retrieve financial quotes, you may discover that your program broke today. This is due to a change in the URL used to request quotes from Yahoo Finance. The previous URL base of:

http://quote.yahoo.com/d?f= (Obsolete–don't use!)

has been changed to:

http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csvr?e=.csv&f=

Apparently, Yahoo had previously accepted the old URL, but starting today it no longer works. If you're using Finance::YahooQuote version 0.21 or earlier, your program will probably break. If you update to Finance::YahooQuote 0.22, the problem should be fixed. Depending on how you've installed Perl on your machine and access this module from your program, the location of the module you need to update will vary.

Posted at
00:08

Friday, May 23, 2008

Global Warming on Jupiter!

According to a paper published in Nature on April 22, 2008, Jupiter's spots are disappearing due to global warming. Environmentalists on Jupiter blame the rapid temperature rise on Earth politicians and celebrities flying to global warming conferences on private jets. Neither Al Gore nor ManBearPig could be reached for comment.

Posted at
18:12

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Reading List: Lockheed F-104 Starfighter

In October 1951, following a fact-finding trip to Korea
where he heard fighter pilots demand a plane with more speed
and altitude capability than anything in existence,
Kelly Johnson
undertook the design of a fighter that would routinely operate
at twice the speed of sound and altitudes in excess of 60,000
feet. Note that this was just four years after Chuck Yeager
first flew at Mach 1 in the rocket-powered
X-1,
and two years before the
Douglas Skyrocket
research plane first achieved Mach 2. Kelly Johnson was nothing if
not ambitious. He was also a man to deliver on his promises: in
December 1952 he presented the completed design to the Air Force,
which in March 1953 awarded a contract to build two experimental
prototypes. On March 4, 1954, just a year later, the first
XF-104 Starfighter made its first flight, and within another year
it had flown at Mach 1.79. (The prototypes used a less powerful
engine than the production model, and were consequently limited
in speed.) In April 1956 the YF-104 production prototype reached
Mach 2, and production models routinely operated at that
speed thereafter. (In fact, the
F-104
had the thrust to go faster:
it was limited to Mach 2 by thermal limits on its aluminium
construction and engine inlet temperature.)

The F-104 became one of the most successful international military
aircraft programs of all time. A total of 2578 planes were
manufactured in seven countries, and served in the air forces of
14 nations. The F-104 remained in service with the Italian
Air Force until 2004, half a century after the flight of the first
prototype.

Looking at a history like this, you begin to think that the days must
have been longer in the 1950s, so compressed were the schedules for
unprecedentedly difficult and complex engineering projects. Compare
the F-104's development history with that of the current U.S. air
superiority fighter, the
F-22, for which a Pentagon
requirement was issued in 1981, contractor proposals were solicited in
1986, and the winner of the design competition (Lockheed, erstwhile builder of the
F-104) selected in 1991. And when did the F-22 enter
squadron service with the Air Force? Well, that would be December
2005, twenty-four years after the Air Force launched the
program. The comparable time for the F-104 was a little more than
six years. Now, granted, the F-22 is a fantastically more complicated
and capable design, but also consider that Kelly Johnson's team
designed the F-104 with slide rules, mechanical calculators, and
drawing boards, while present day aircraft use modeling and simulation
tools which would have seemed like science fiction to designers
of the fifties.

This prolifically illustrated book, written by a 35 year
veteran of flight test engineering at Lockheed with a foreword
by a former president of Lockheed-California who was the
chief aerodynamicist of the XF-104 program, covers all aspects
of this revolutionary airplane, from design concepts, flight testing,
weapons systems, evolution of the design over the years,
international manufacturing and deployment, and modifications
and research programs. Readers interested in the history and
technical details of one of Kelly Johnson's greatest triumphs,
and a peek into the hands-on cut and try engineering of the 1950s will
find this book a pure delight.

Posted at
22:26

Monday, May 19, 2008

Reading List: The Revolution

Ron Paul's campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential
nomination has probably done more to expose voters in the
United States to the message of limited, constitutional
governance, individual liberty, non-interventionist
foreign policy, and sound money than any political
initiative in decades. Although largely ignored by the
collectivist legacy media, the stunning fund-raising success
of the campaign, even if not translated into corresponding
success at the polls, is evidence that this essentially
libertarian message (indeed, Dr. Paul ran for president in
1988 as the standard bearer of the Libertarian Party)
resonates with a substantial part of the American electorate,
even among the “millennial generation”,
which conventional wisdom believes thoroughly indoctrinated
with collectivist dogma and poised to vote away the last
vestiges of individual freedom in the United States. In
the concluding chapter, the candidate observes:

The fact is, liberty is not given a fair chance in
our society, neither in the media, nor in politics,
nor (especially) in education. I have spoken to many
young people during my career, some of whom had never
heard my ideas before. But as soon as I explained the
philosophy of liberty and told them a little American
history in light of that philosophy, their eyes lit
up. Here was something they'd never heard before, but
something that was compelling and moving, and which
appealed to their sense of idealism. Liberty had
simply never been presented to them as a choice.
(p. 158)

This slender (173 page) book presents that choice as
persuasively and elegantly as anything I have read.
Further, the case for liberty is anchored in the
tradition of American history and the classic
conservatism which characterised the Republican party
for the first half of the 20th century. The author
repeatedly demonstrates just how recent much of the
explosive growth in government has been, and observes
that people seemed to get along just fine, and the
economy prospered, without the crushing burden of
intrusive regulation and taxation. One of the most
striking examples is the discussion of abolishing the
personal income tax. “Impossible”, as
other politicians would immediately shout? Well,
the personal income tax accounts for about 40% of federal
revenue, so eliminating it would require reducing the
federal budget by the same 40%. How far back would you
have to go in history to discover an epoch where the
federal budget was 40% below that of 2007? Why, you'd
have to go all the way back to 1997! (p. 80)

The big government politicians who dominate both major
political parties in the United States dismiss the
common-sense policies advocated by Ron Paul in this book
by saying “you can't turn back the clock”. But
as Chesterton observed, why not? You can
turn back a clock, and you can replace disastrous policies
which are bankrupting a society and destroying personal liberty
with time-tested policies which have delivered prosperity
and freedom for centuries wherever adopted. Paul argues
that the debt-funded imperial nanny state is doomed in any case by
simple economic considerations. The only question is whether
it is deliberately and systematically dismantled by
the kinds of incremental steps he advocates here, or
eventually
collapses Soviet-style
due to bankruptcy and/or
hyperinflation. Should the U.S., as many expect, lurch
dramatically in the collectivist direction in the coming
years, it will only accelerate the inevitable debacle.

Anybody who wishes to discover alternatives
to the present course and that limited constitutional
government is not a relic of the past but the only
viable alternative for a free people to live in peace
and prosperity will find this book an excellent introduction
to the libertarian/constitutionalist perspective. A five
page reading list cites both classics of libertarian thought
and analyses of historical and contemporary events from a
libertarian viewpoint.

Posted at
20:32

Friday, May 16, 2008

Reading List: Fallen Angels

I do not have the slightest idea what the authors were up to
in writing this novel. All three are award-winning writers
of “hard” science fiction, and the first two are
the most celebrated team working in that genre of all time.
I thought I'd read all of the Niven and Pournelle (and
assorted others) collaborations, but I only discovered this one
when the 2004 reprint edition was mentioned on
Jerry Pournelle's Web log.

The premise is interesting, indeed delicious: neo-Luddite
environmentalists have so crippled the U.S. economy (and presumably
that of other industrialised nations, although they do not figure
in the novel) that an incipient global cooling trend due to
solar
inactivity has tipped over into an ice age. Technologists are
actively persecuted, and the U.S. and Soviet space stations and
their crews have been marooned in orbit, left to fend for themselves
without support from Earth. (The story is set in an unspecified
future era in which the orbital habitats accommodate a substantially
larger population than space stations envisioned when the
novel was published, and have access to lunar resources.)

The earthbound technophobes, huddling in the cold and dark as the
glaciers advance, and the orbiting technophiles, watching their
meagre resources dwindle despite their cleverness, are forced to
confront one another when a “scoop ship” harvesting
nitrogen from Earth's atmosphere is shot down by a missile and
makes a crash landing on the ice cap descending on upper midwest
of the United States. The two “angels”—spacemen—are
fugitives sought by the Green enforcers, and figures of legend to
that small band of Earthlings who preserve the dream of a human
destiny in the stars.

And who would they be? Science fiction fans, of course! Sorry,
but you just lost me, right about when I almost lost my lunch. By “fans”,
we aren't talking about people like me, and probably many readers of this
chronicle, whose sense of wonder was kindled in childhood by science fiction
and who, even as adults, find it almost unique among contemporary literary
genera in being centred on ideas, and exploring “what if”
scenarios that other authors do not even imagine. No, here we're talking
about the subculture of “fandom”, a group of people, defying
parody by transcending the most outrageous attempts, who invest
much of their lives into elaborating their own private vocabulary,
writing instantly forgotten fan fiction and fanzines, snarking and sniping
at one another over incomprehensible disputes, and organising conventions
whose names seem ever so clever only to other fans, where they gather to
reinforce their behaviour. The premise here is that when the mainstream
culture goes South (literally, as the glaciers descend from the
North), “who's gonna save us?”—the fans!

I like to think that more decades of reading science fiction than
I'd like to admit to has exercised my ability to suspend
disbelief to such a degree that I'm willing to accept
just about any self-consistent premise as
the price of admission to an entertaining yarn. Heck, last week
I recommended a zombie book! But for the work of three renowned
hard science fiction writers, there are a lot of serious factual
flubs here. (Page numbers are from the mass market paperback
edition cited above.)

The
Titan II
(not “Titan Two”) uses
Aerozine 50
and
Nitrogen tetroxide
as propellants,
not RP-1 (kerosene) and LOX. One could not fuel a
Titan II with RP-1 and LOX, not only because the sizes of the
propellant tanks would be incorrect for the mixture
ratio of the propellants, but because the Titan II lacks
the ignition system for non-hypergolic propellants.
(pp. 144–145)

“Just hydrogen. But you can compress it, and
it will liquify. It is not that difficult.”. Well,
actually, it is. The
critical
point for hydrogen is 23.97° K, so regardless of how
much you compress it, you still need to refrigerate it to a
temperature less than half that of liquid nitrogen to obtain the
liquid phase. For liquid hydrogen at one atmosphere, you need
to chill it to 20.28° K. You don't just need a compressor,
you need a powerful cryostat to liquefy hydrogen.
“…letting the O2 boil off.”
Oxygen squared? Please, it's O2. (p. 290)

“…the jets were brighter than the dawn…“.
If this had been in verse, I'd have let it stand as metaphorical,
but it's descriptive prose and dead wrong. The Phoenix
is fueled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen, which burn with an
almost invisible flame. There's no way the rocket exhaust
would have been brighter than the dawn.

Now it seems to me there are three potential explanations of the
numerous lapses of this story from the grounded-in-reality
attention to detail one expects in hard science fiction.

The authors deliberately wished to mock science
fiction fans who, while able to reel off the entire credits
of 1950s B movie creature features from memory, pay little
attention to the actual history and science of the
real world, and hence they get all kinds
of details wrong while spouting off authoritatively.

The story is set is an alternative universe,
just a few forks from
the one we inhabit. Consequently, the general outline
is the same, but the little details differ. Like,
for example, science fiction fans being able to
work together to accomplish something productive.

This manuscript, which, the authors “suspect
that few books have ever been delivered this close to
a previously scheduled publication date”
(p. 451) was never subjected to the intensive
fact-checking scrutiny which the better kind of
obsessive-compulsive fan will contribute out of a sense
that even fiction must be right where it
intersects reality.

I'm not gonna fingo any
hypotheses here. If you have no interest whatsoever in
the world of science fiction fandom, you'll probably, like
me, consider this the “Worst Niven and Pournelle—Ever”.
On the other hand, if you can reel off every Worldcon from the
first Boskone to the present and pen Feghoots for the local
'zine on days you're not rehearsing with the filk band, you may
have a different estimation of this novel.

Posted at
23:17

Monday, May 12, 2008

Reading List: Decline and Fall

This slim volume (135 pages of main text, 161 pages
in its entirety—the book is erroneously listed
on Amazon.com as 300 pages in length) is an epitaph
for the postwar European experiment. The
author considers Europe, as defined by the post-Christian,
post-national “EUtopia” envisioned by
proponents of the European Union as already irretrievably
failed, facing collapse in the coming decades due to
economic sclerosis from bloated and intrusive statist
policies, unsustainable welfare state expenditures,
a demographic death spiral already beyond recovery, and
transformation by a burgeoning Islamic immigrant population
which Europeans lack the will to confront and compel
to assimilate as a condition of residence. The book is
concise, well-argued, and persuasive, but I'm not sure
why it is ultimately necessary.

The same issues are discussed at greater length, more
deeply, and with abundant documentation in recent books
such as
Mark Steyn's
America Alone
(November 2006),
Claire Berlinski's
Menace in Europe
(July 2006), and
Bruce Bawer's
While Europe Slept
(June 2007), all of which are cited as
sources in this work. If you're
looking for a very brief introduction and overview
of Europe's problems, this book provides one, but
readers interested in details of the present situation
and prospects for the future will be better served by
one of the books mentioned above.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Linux: Installing Microsoft Core Fonts on Fedora 7 Linux

Well-designed Web pages do not require specific fonts, but use generic font family specifications such as “serif”, “sans-serif”, and “monospace”, allowing users to specify which fonts on their own machines will be used for text of each style. Unfortunately, not only do many Web pages specify particular fonts by name without any generic alternative, some prescribe Windows-specific fonts which are not available, by default, to users viewing such pages on other platforms.

Users of non-Windows machines have become accustomed not only to pages designed and tested only on Microsoft Internet Explorer which fall on their face when displayed by competently implemented standards compliant browsers, but also pages which pass HTML/XHTML/CSS validation yet display infelicitously because they request and assume the availability of Windows-specific fonts.

While page designers should not, under any circumstances, require proprietary fonts for their pages and, when expressing a preference for a platform-specific font, always test that the page displays properly when the browser falls back to a generic alternative, Linux users who view pages not designed for portability can mitigate the ugliness on their screens by installing the msttcorefonts package, which includes a collection of commonly-specified Microsoft fonts which are “redistributable”, including Andalemo, Arial, Comic Sans, Courier, Georgia, Impact, Tahoma, Times, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings.

Users of Fedora 7 Linux can install this package on their systems with the following commands, executed as super-user:

After installing the new fonts, you'll have to log out and log back in (but not reboot) in order to use them when displaying Web pages.

While this may be considered as accommodating, if not enabling, designers of non-portable Web pages, the fact is that installing these fonts will make many frequently-visited sites much more legible on the screen. I wish it were otherwise, but eyestrain on your part punishes only you, not the page designer who specified a Microsoft font, so why not at least mitigate the problem on your end?

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Reading List: The Peloponnesian War, Vol. 1

Not only is
The
Peloponnesian War the first true work of history to have come
down to us from antiquity, in writing it
Thucydides essentially
invented the historical narrative as it is presently understood. Although
having served as a general
(στρατηγός)
on the Athenian side in the war, he adopts a scrupulously objective viewpoint and
presents the motivations, arguments, and actions of all sides in the conflict
in an even-handed manner. Perhaps his having been exiled from Athens due to
arriving too late to save
Amphipolis
from falling to the Spartans
contributed both to his dispassionate recounting of the war as well as
providing the leisure to write the work. Thucydides himself wrote:

It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty
years after my command at Amphipolis; and being present with both
parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of
my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs somewhat particularly.

Unlike earlier war narratives in epic poetry, Thucydides based
his account purely upon the actions of the human participants
involved. While he includes the prophecies of oracles and auguries,
he considers them important only to the extent they influenced
decisions made by those who gave them credence. Divine intervention
plays no part whatsoever in his description of events, and in his
account of the
Athenian Plague
he even mocks how prophecies are interpreted to fit subsequent
events. In addition to military and political affairs, Thucydides
was a keen observer of natural phenomena: his account of the Athenian
Plague reads like that of a modern epidemiologist, including his
identifying overcrowding and poor sanitation as contributing factors
and the observation that surviving the disease (as he did himself)
conferred immunity. He further observes that solar eclipses
appear to occur only at the new Moon, and may have been the first
to
identify
earthquakes as the cause of tsunamis.

In the text, Thucydides includes lengthy speeches made by figures on
all sides of the conflict, both in political assemblies and those of
generals exhorting their troops to battle. He admits in the
introduction that in many cases no contemporary account of these
speeches exists and that he simply made up what he believed the
speaker would likely have said given the circumstances. While this is
not a technique modern historians would employ, Greeks, from their
theatre and poetry, were accustomed to narratives presented in this
form and Thucydides, inventing the concept of history as he wrote it,
saw nothing wrong with inventing words in the absence of eyewitness
accounts. What is striking is how modern everything seems.
There are descriptions of the strategy of a sea power (Athens)
confronted by a land power (Sparta), the dangers of alliances which
invite weaker allies to take risks that involve their guarantors in
unwanted and costly conflicts, the difficulties in mounting an
amphibious assault on a defended shore, the challenge a democratic
society has in remaining focused on a long-term conflict with an
authoritarian opponent, and the utility of economic warfare (or, as
Thucydides puts it [over and over again], “ravaging the
countryside”) in sapping the adversary's capacity and will to
resist. Readers with stereotyped views of Athens and Sparta may be
surprised that many at the time of the war viewed Sparta as a
liberator of independent cities from the yoke of the Athenian empire,
and that Thucydides, an Athenian, often seems sympathetic to this
view. Many of the speeches could have been given by present-day
politicians and generals, except they would be unlikely to be as
eloquent or argue their case so cogently. One understands why
Thucydides was not only read over the centuries (at least prior to the
present Dark Time, when the priceless patrimony of Western culture has
been jettisoned and largely forgotten) for its literary excellence,
but is still studied in military academies for its timeless insights
into the art of war and the dynamics of societies at war. While
modern readers may find the actual campaigns sporadic and the battles
on a small scale by present day standards, from the Hellenic perspective,
which saw their culture of city-states as “civilisation”
surrounded by a sea of barbarians, this was a world war, and
Thucydides records it as such a momentous event.

This is Volume 1 of the audiobook, which includes the first
four of the eight books into which Thucydides's text is conventionally
divided, covering the prior history of Greece and the first nine years of
the war, through the Thracian campaigns of the Spartan
Brasidas
in 423 B.C.
(Here is Volume 2, with the balance.)
The audiobook is distributed in two parts, totalling 14 hours and 50
minutes with more than a hour of introductory essays including
a biography of Thucydides and an overview of the work.
The Benjamin Jowett translation is used, read by the versatile
Charlton Griffin.
A print edition of this translation is
available.

Posted at
18:23

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Reading List: World War Z

Brooks, Max.
World War Z.
New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-307-34661-2.

Few would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first
century, as people busied themselves with their various concerns
and little affairs, while their “leaders” occupied
themselves with “crises” such as shortages of petroleum,
mountains of bad debt, and
ManBearPig,
that in rural China a virus had mutated, replicating and
spreading among the human population like creatures that swarm
and multiply in a drop of water, slowly at first, with early
outbreaks covered up to avoid bad publicity before the Chicom
Olympics, soon thereafter to explode into a global contagion
that would remake the world, rewrite human history, and sweep
away all of the prewar concerns of mankind as trivialities
while eliminating forever the infinite complacency humans had
of their empire over matter and dominion over nature.

This book is an oral history of the Zombie War, told in the words of
those who survived, fought, and ultimately won it. Written just ten
years after victory was declared in China, with hotspots around the
globe remaining to be cleared, it is a story of how cultures around
the globe came to terms with a genuine existential threat, and how
people and societies rise to a challenge inconceivable to a prewar
mentality. Reading much like
Studs Terkel's The Good War,
the individual voices, including civilians, soldiers,
researchers, and military and political leaders trace how
unthinkable circumstances require unthinkable responses, and
how ordinary people react under extraordinary stress. The
emergence of the Holy Russian Empire, the evacuation and
eventual reconquest of Japan, the rise of Cuba to a global
financial power, the climactic end of the Second Chinese
Revolution, and the enigma of the fate of North Korea are told
in the words of eyewitnesses and participants.

Now, folks, this a zombie book, so if you're someone inclined
to ask, “How, precisely, does this work?”, or to
question the biological feasibility of the dead surviving in
the depths of the ocean or freezing in the arctic winter and
reanimating come spring, you're going to have trouble with
this story. Suspending your disbelief and accepting the basic
premise is the price of admission, but if you're willing to
pay it, this is an enjoyable, unsettling, and ultimately
rewarding read—even inspiring in its own strange way.
It is a narrative of an apocalyptic epoch which works,
and is about ten times better than Stephen King's
The Stand. The author
is a recognised global authority on the
zombie peril.

(Yes, the first paragraph of these remarks is paraphrased from
this; I thought
it appropriate.)

Posted at
16:17

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Reading List: Millennial Makeover

This is a disturbing book on a number of different levels.
People, especially residents of the United States or subject
to its jurisdiction, who cherish individual liberty and
economic freedom should obtain a copy of this work
(ideally, by buying a used copy to avoid putting money
in the authors' pockets), put a clothespin on their noses,
and read the whole thing (it only takes a day or so), being
warned in advance that it may induce feelings of nausea and
make you want to take three or four showers when you're done.

The premise of the book is taken from Strauss and Howe's
Generations, which
argues that American history is characterised by a repeating
pattern of four kinds of generations, alternating between
“idealistic” and “civic” periods on
a roughly forty year cycle (two generations in each period).
These periods have nothing to do with the notions of
“right” and “left”—American
history provides examples of periods of both types identified
with each political tendency.

The authors argue that the United States are approaching the end
of an idealistic period with a rightward tendency which began
in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon, which supplanted
the civic leftward period which began with the New Deal and
ended in the excesses of the 1960s. They argue that the transition
between idealistic and civic periods is signalled by a “realigning
election”, in which the coalitions supporting political parties
are remade, defining a new alignment and majority party which will
dominate government for the next four decades or so.

These realignment elections usually mark the entrance of a new
generation into the political arena (initially as voters and activists, only
later as political figures), and the nature of the coming era can
be limned, the authors argue, by examining the formative experiences
of the rising generation and the beliefs they take into adulthood.
Believing that a grand realignment is imminent, if not already
underway, and that its nature will be determined by what they
call the “Millennial Generation” (the cohort born between
1982 through 2003: a group larger in numbers than the Baby Boom
generation), the authors examine the characteristics and beliefs
of this generation, the eldest members of which are now entering
the electorate, to divine the nature of the post-realignment
political landscape. If they are correct in their conclusions,
it is a prospect to induce fear, if not despair, in lovers of
liberty. Here are some quotes.

The inevitable loss in privacy and freedom that has been
a constant characteristic of the nation's reaction to any
crisis that threatens America's future will more easily
be accepted by a generation that willingly opts to share
personal information with advertisers just for the sake of
earning a few “freebies.” After 9/11 and the
massacres at Columbine and Virginia Tech, Millennials are not
likely to object to increased surveillance and other intrusions
into their private lives if it means increased levels of
personal safety. The shape of America's political landscape
after a civic realignment is thus more likely to favor policies
that involve collective action and individual accountability
than the libertarian approaches so much favored by Gen-Xers.
(p. 200)

As the newest civic realignment evolves, the center of America's
public policy will continue to shift away from an emphasis on
individual rights and public morality toward a search for
solutions that benefit the entire community in as equitable
and orderly way as possible. Majorities will coalesce around
ideas that involve the entire group in the solution and
downplay the right of individuals to opt out of the process.
(p. 250)

Millennials favor environmental protection even at the cost of
economic growth by a somewhat wider margin than any other
generation (43% for Millennials vs. 40% for Gen-Xers and 38%
for Baby Boomers), hardly surprising, given the emphasis this
issue received in their favorite childhood television programs
such as “Barney” and “Sesame Street”
(Frank N. Magid Associates, May 2007). (p. 263)

Deep thinkers, those millennials! (Note that these “somewhat
wider” margins are within the statistical sampling error of
the cited survey [p. xiv].)

The whole scheme of alternating idealist and civic epochs is presented
with a historicist inevitability worthy of Hegel or Marx. While
one can argue that this kind of cycle is like the
oscillation between
crunchy
and soggy, it seems to me that the authors must be exceptionally
stupid, oblivious to facts before their faces, or guilty of a
breathtaking degree of intellectual dishonesty to ignore the influence
of the relentless indoctrination of this generation with collectivist
dogma in government schools and the legacy entertainment and news
media—and I do not believe the authors are either idiots nor
imperceptive. What they are, however, are long-term activists
(since the 1970s) in the Democratic party, who welcome the emergence
of a “civic” generation which they view as the raw material
for advancing the agenda which FDR launched with the aid of the previous
large civic generation in the 1930s.

Think about it. A generation which has been inculcated with the
kind of beliefs illustrated by the quotations above, and which is
largely ignorant of history (and much of the history they've been
taught is bogus, agenda-driven propaganda), whose communications
are mostly “peer-to-peer”—with other
identically-indoctrinated members of the same generation, is the
ideal putty in the hands of a charismatic leader bent on
“unifying” a nation by using the coercive power of the
state to enforce the “one best way”.

The authors make an attempt to present the millenials as a pool
of potential voters in search of a political philosophy and party
embodying it which, once chosen, they will likely continue to
identify with for the rest of their lives (party allegiance, they
claim, is much stronger in civic than in idealist eras). But it's
clear that the book is, in fact, a pitch to the Democratic party
to recruit these people: Republican politicians and conservative
causes are treated with thinly veiled contempt.

This is entirely a book about political strategy aimed at electoral
success. There is no discussion whatsoever of the specific policies
upon which campaigns will be based, how they are to be implemented,
or what their consequences will be for the nation. The authors almost
seem to welcome catastrophes such as a “major terrorist
attack … major environmental disaster … chronic, long-lasting
war … hyperinflation … attack on the U.S. with nuclear
weapons … major health catastrophe … major economic collapse
… world war … and/or a long struggle like the
Cold War” as being “events of significant magnitude
to trigger a civic realignment” (p. 201).

I've written before about my decision to get out of the United
States in the early 1990s, which decision I have never regretted.
That move was based largely upon economic fundamentals, which I
believed, and continue to believe, are not sustainable and will
end badly. Over the last decade, I have been increasingly
unsettled by my interactions with members of the tail-end of
Generation X and the next generation, whatever you call it. If the
picture presented in this book is correct (and I have no
way to know whether it is), and their impact upon the U.S. political
scene is anything like that envisioned by the authors,
anybody still in the U.S. who values their liberty and autonomy
has an even more urgent reason to get out, and quickly.

Posted at
23:17

Monday, May 5, 2008

Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone Now Online

The seventeenth installment in the Tom Swift adventures, Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone, is now posted in the Tom Swift and His Pocket Library collection. As usual, HTML, PDF, PDA eReader, and plain ASCII text editions suitable for reading off- or online are available.

This is one of the geekier of the original Tom Swift adventures. Tom, despite his father's conviction that “it can't be done” sets out to build a picturephone in 1914, with a few added features including what amounts to a surveillance camera and FAX machine. He describes how a flat plate sensor made of selenium could be used to encode an image for transmission, which isn't a bad guess based upon the state of knowledge at the time. The invention, as usual, figures in an adventure in which frequent companion Wakefield “bless my imprudent investment” Damon is fleeced by a con-man, who then makes off with Tom's airship and then the unfortunate Mr. Damon himself. While Mr. Damon is offstage for most of the story, Ned Newton, the giant Koku, and Eradicate Sampson play major parts, with Eradicate inadvertently making the key insight which gets Tom's invention working.

I have corrected typographical and formatting errors I spotted while editing the text, but have deferred close proofreading until I get around to reading the book on my PDA. Corrections from readers are more than welcome; please cite the context of the correction rather than a page number, as these differ from edition to edition. Please note the comments in the main Pocket Library page before reporting archaic spelling (for example, “gasolene”, “to-morrow”, or “clew”) as an error.

This book brings the Tom Swift saga from its inception in 1910 through 1914 for a total of seventeen books. While the first novels in the series came fast and furious, starting in 1912 one book per year in the series was published. Eight public domain Tom Swift novels remain, and I'll continue to add them to this collection at the rate of two or three a year. There are a total of forty adventures in the original Tom Swift series, but those published between 1923 and 1941 will not enter the public domain until 95 years after their copyright date (assuming the law isn't changed before then), so none of these can be posted before 2019.

Posted at
23:55

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Reading List: Spying on the Bomb

I had some trepidation about picking up this book. Having read the
author's The Wizards of Langley
(May 2002), expecting an account of “Q Branch”
spy gizmology and encountering instead a tedious (albeit well-written
and thorough) bureaucratic history of the CIA's Directorate of Science
and Technology, I was afraid this volume might also reduce one of the
most critical missions of U.S. intelligence in the post World War II
era to another account of interagency squabbling and budget battles.
Not to worry—although such matters are discussed where
appropriate (especially when they led to intelligence failures), the
book not only does not disappoint, it goes well beyond the mission of
its subtitle, “American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany
to Iran and North Korea” in delivering not just an account of
intelligence activity but also a comprehensive history of the nuclear
programs of each of the countries upon which the U.S. has focused its
intelligence efforts: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, France,
Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Libya, Iraq, North
Korea, and Iran.

The reader gets an excellent sense of just how difficult it is, even
in an age of high-resolution optical and radar satellite imagery,
communications intelligence, surveillance of commercial and
financial transactions, and active efforts to recruit human
intelligence sources, to determine the intentions of states
intent (or maybe not) on developing nuclear weapons. The
ease with which rogue regimes seem to be able to evade
IAEA
safeguards and inspectors, and manipulate diplomats
loath to provoke a confrontation, is illustrated
on numerous occasions. An entire chapter is devoted to the
enigmatic double
flash incident of September 22nd, 1979 whose interpretation
remains in dispute today. This 2007 paperback edition includes a
new epilogue with information on the October 2006
North Korean “fissile or fizzle”
nuclear
test, and recent twists and turns in the feckless
international effort to restrain Iran's nuclear program.